Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895)

The writings and activities of the 19th-century revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels, more directly than the work and texts of his more famous friend, comrade, and collaborator Karl Marx, shaped the modern communist movement and through it the course of modern world history.

Born on November 28, 1820, Friedrich was the eldest of six children. His father held a partnership in a thread-spinning factory in Barmen, a city located in the Wuppertal (Wupper Valley), the most industrialized area of Germany, colloquially known as “little Manchester” because of the extensive textile industry there. His father practiced pietism (Lutheranism heavily influenced by Calvinist teachings), which discouraged the pursuit of worldly pleasures. By his early 20s, Engels had developed a critique of the capitalist ethic and religiosity that had shaped his father's life. These critiques, in turn, provided the young Engels with his life's future directions.

His father insisted that Engels leave school at 16 to learn the family business. When the Engels turned 18, he continued his apprenticeship in the Hanseatic port of Bremen, where his critical spirit thrived in a cosmopolitan atmosphere that brought the popular radical theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher and David Strauss, who attacked Christian dogmatism, to his attention. He wrote articles on social life in Bremen and critical commentaries on social conditions in industrial Wuppertal. Influenced by the young German movement, Engels became politically radical, religiously liberal, and socially conscious. Volunteering for military service in late 1841, he spent a year in Berlin at a time when radical Hegelianism, a critique of contemporary religion and politics based on the philosopher Georg Hegel's ideas of dialectic and negativity, flowered there. As an ardent Young Hegelian, Engels believed that the critique of contemporary religion and politics would lead to transcending their inadequacies.

When his military service was over in October 1842, Engels went to Cologne on his way home to Barmen to meet the editors of the Rheinische Zeitung, a radical newspaper that published articles by the Berlin Young Hegelians. The trip forever changed his life. The newspaper's founder, Moses Hess, was a left-wing socialist who, according to all accounts, converted Engels to communism in late 1842. Hess convinced Engels that a communist revolution was imminent in the most [Page 523]industrially advanced country, England, so Engels decided when he was back in Barmen to combine business with politics and go to work in his father's branch factory in Manchester. On his way to England he stopped again in Cologne and met Karl Marx, the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, for the first time. The meeting was cordial but cool. The years he spent in Manchester, 1842 to 1844, were a major turning point in his intellectual development: They brought the importance of economic factors and class conflict in the development of modern society to the forefront of his thinking, and they began his lifelong preoccupation with social injustice and its remedy through social revolution and the emancipation of the proletariat.

Engels continued to write for Marx while residing in England. After the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung by the Prussian authorities, Marx moved to Paris and edited the Deutsch-Französischer Jahrbücher, and Engels sent him a piece to publish. The article, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, argued for the idea that the working class would become inevitably impoverished under capitalism and just as inevitably revolt against the economic system responsible for its immiseration. Crucially, it awakened in Marx an interest in political economy that would become his life's work, leading to the publication of his 1867 magnum opus, Das Kapital. When Engels came through Paris on his way home to Barmen in September 1844 and met Marx again, he and Marx found themselves in complete agreement on questions of theory and politics, and their lifelong collaboration began.

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